


The Language of Home

by hedda62



Category: Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-15
Updated: 2011-07-15
Packaged: 2017-10-21 10:22:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/224130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedda62/pseuds/hedda62
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rescued island girl Sarah Sweeting reflects on her life aboard <i>Surprise</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Language of Home

Sometimes she still dreamed in the old words, the chattering of children and the gossip and teaching of her elders, and could not tell when she woke what they had said. Once she tried out some half-remembered phrases on Emily over their breakfast, and Emily laughed at her and mimicked the nonsense back. Emily had dreamed of whales.

The _Surprise_ was their home now, had been almost since the beginning of time, but they had had another home once, and maybe Emily had forgot that. Though how she could, Sarah had no notion, since each time they met someone new Dr. Maturin told the story over again. Sarah had heard it in English many a time, and in Irish and Spanish and Latin -- she didn't know those words, but she knew the tale nonetheless -- but never in the language she was born to, unless that was what they were telling her in the dreams. _Once there were two little girls who lived on an island:_ a voice went with that, a way of saying words that meant they were a story. But on the island they would not have said "on an island" because the island was all there was, as far as you could see over the sea. And no one was left there to tell stories.

They told stories on the _Surprise_ , though: not just the story of Sarah and Emily and Sweeting's Island. On Sundays Dr. Maturin told them about Holy Mary and Saint Patrick, and Padeen told them, or tried to, what the pigs were like in Ireland, and Mrs. Oakes before she left the ship told them a story about kangaroos she had heard from someone who'd heard it from one of the black people in New South Wales. Before Mr. Martin grew sad and sick he would tell them about the animals who had bitten him in other parts of the world, and he and Dr. Maturin told them about birds and sharks, and often they had seen and been told what those creatures (and people, too) looked like when cut up, though Sarah was not certain that counted as stories.

But most of their stories came from Jemmy Ducks, when they all huddled together in the fo'c'sle of a cool evening with the hogs and the chickens (when they had hogs and chickens). He told them about England, not as it was (though they heard enough of Mrs. Jemmy and the screaming babies, not in the storytelling voice however) but as it had been when he was a boy, when the free traders brought their boats in through storm and spray, dodging the revenue, and went inside houses of stone to drink grog and warm their hands over fires (it was always cold in England), until luck turned and they were caught and put to the rope (this meant they died, Sarah wasn't certain how, but the rope was good luck ever after), and horses and dogs grew fidgety at the spot. ("What about hogs?" Sarah had asked. "Ah, hogs," said Jemmy. "Hogs is too smart for that. They can see the wind, you know.") There were ghosts on ships too, but Jemmy only tried to tell them those tales twice and then stopped because they made Emily grizzle. And Sarah too, a little, quietly. She felt, though she could not remember why, that homes should have spirits in them, islands and England and New South Wales and Peru, but ships were a different sort of home because they moved about. You might so easily lose your own ghosts and pick up someone else's, like they had picked up bits of the American ship's barrels.

None of the island ghosts had got aboard the _Surprise_ , she didn't think. They didn't speak the language.

 _Once there were two little girls who lived on an island._ When they first learned English Sarah hadn't known what it meant when the men called Emily "your sister" and she let them go on saying it. In fact she had not found out the word's meaning until they visited Father Panda in Lima, and saw the women, plain like gulls, in the bright and gold of the cathedral. They laughed at her when she asked; they always laughed. Sisters of Christ didn't mean they were Mary's babies, no more than Father Panda was anyone's father (though the captain was his. Jemmy Ducks told them so). But sisters not in the Church had the same father, or the same mother, or both, and Sarah and Emily had neither. In the language she didn't remember there was a word for what they were. It took her a long time to puzzle it out in English, till they were south of the Horn in all that cold and wind, and then Emily said it out loud first, telling Jemmy all the brothers and uncles and holy grandmothers. He shook his head at them and said, "You're kin. Cousins, maybe. Ain't that enough?"

Sarah was about to say, no, it weren't, but then she thought: _we are the only ones left. Once there were two little girls who lived on a ship, and they were kin._ Everyone on the island had been kin; no one was kin on the ship but Emily. She squeezed Emily's hand, the hand of her maybe-sister. Before the smallpox, they had not even been very good friends.

They were going to live in London, in an inn built of brick (a different sort of brick than in Lima), called The Grapes, which was a kind of fruit they made wine out of, and also the pisco that she and Emily had got themselves shamefully drunken upon at Father Panda's house. Everything had been very funny, and then they had been sick. In London they would learn how to sew better and clean dishes and make beds and all that was needed in an inn, and Sarah thought she would enjoy it, except for the cold, if she didn't have to tell her story to everyone she met. But Jemmy said she would have to, often enough. "People want to know where you hail from," he said. "But you won't be alone. There's people in London from all over." He meant there were other black people. Sometimes Sarah wished there weren't, not in London or anywhere, because it made her think of the island that she couldn't remember and would never go back to, the place she would have to say was home, and of all the places that were not-home, like Africa that Father Panda came from, half a world away. They were brother and sisters in Christ, he had said, but not in any other way, not even cousins. Black people from Africa had nothing to do with black people from Sweeting's Island, no matter what some people thought.

She didn't want to be from either of those places, or anywhere else. She was a Surprise, and so was Emily, and Jemmy and all the others too. Maybe she could tell a new story, that she was born on the ship -- like an island that moved, and sometimes alone as far as you could see over the sea -- but she didn't know who could be her mother then, or if she and Emily should have the same one. And telling that might be a lie, like what happened to the red hen's egg or why Sarah had put pins in her mouth, and it was bad to tell lies; you had to say an Act of Contrition, which was almost a story told to God except He already knew all the words.

The difference between stories and lies was hard to understand, because even when a story was all the way true sometimes people told it wrong, or left bits out, but that was not bad. Every time Dr. Maturin told the story of Sarah and Emily, it changed a little, not just longer or shorter but less true and better for telling. He usually left out the lice now, but when he had time he always told how Mr. Martin had not wanted to lay Emily in the boat because he was afraid she would wake, and the captain said anyone could see he was not a father.

Dr. Maturin was a father, not Sarah's father though. Emily had asked him if he was hers, and he had looked surprised (for he was a Surprise too. Sarah had told Jemmy the joke later) and said no, but he would take care of them and give them a place to live and make sure their prize money was kept safe. It was not a stupid question, if Emily did not remember the island, because if the captain was Father Panda's father, and he as black as the tar on the yards, then Dr. Maturin could be Emily's. But he wasn't. In England children had the surname of their father, and where black people were slaves they had the surname of their owner, and in neither way could Sarah and Emily be called Maturin, that was what he said. So he had called them after the island, as if it was their father, and they sisters after all: Sarah and Emily Sweeting. Sweeting was a midshipman on the ship that had found the island, not that it had been lost before then, because their holy grandparents had been living there, and theirs before them, and they named the island by another name.

Sweeting was a good name, like treacle and cherimoyas, and her name was better than Emily's because of the S's, like in Surprise. But in her dreams she was called something else, something secret in the language of home. People had different names, like Dr. Maturin was Stephen (another S) as well as Doctor, and the platypus that almost killed him was called water-mole and ornithorhynchus, and sometimes ships were given new names too. When they joined the _Berenice_ and went aboard her to visit, someone had hallo'ed Jemmy Ducks, who had not come with them, and Sarah had turned around to see a stranger answer, another man with the same name. Her Jemmy explained, when they got back, that it was more of a title, like Captain except not so grand.

"Which my real name is Thurlow. John Thurlow, but they like to have rechristened me when I signed aboard. Funny that, how any name will do as long as you can call it your own." He was the only Jemmy Ducks on the _Surprise_ , and that was good enough for him. At home, there was another John Thurlow, his cousin, and somewhere in England there might be another Sarah Sweeting, if say the midshipman had grown up and married and had a daughter. Sarah would like to meet her, if she was real and not a lie. Jemmy Ducks, the name, was not real or a lie, but more like a story. _Once there was a man who looked after the chickens._ (They hadn't had any ducks since before the Horn, and the butcher saw to the new hogs, which were more like the pigs Padeen had in Ireland, and not like the ones from the island, that ate taro from Sarah's hand and could see the wind.)

Sarah Sweeting was a story too: a surprising story. When you heard Jemmy Ducks, you knew that story already, like God knew your sins. But when you heard Sarah's name you might think, was she the midshipman's daughter, or was she a little girl from an island on the far side of the world, and you would have to listen, in whatever language you understood, and find out how the story began, and how it ended.


End file.
